#ThinkfullyHabit: Switch on your 'spidey senses'
We are pattern spotters. We love to see connections and work out how things fit together. The other side of the coin is spotting when patterns don’t quite fit together in the right way. However, this can be hard. It’s less obvious and we’re not always tuned into the signals.
Anomalies can trigger our ‘spidey-senses’ and give important feedback when the patterns we expect to see aren’t happening and our expectations have been contravened in some way. They can signpost when things start to deviate away from what we’d expect.
“When we detect anomalies we are seeing disconnections—things that do not fit together.”
WHY?
Anomalies can help us spot things that are otherwise missed. Take the example of the traffic cop who was on a routine patrol and waiting at the traffic lights for the lights to change. While waiting he noticed that the driver of the new BMW car in front was smoking a cigarette and instead of flicking the ash outside the car, he flicked it inside onto the car's upholstery. The traffic cop couldn’t quite make sense of it – he couldn’t reconcile why someone would do that to their nice new car. It was this anomaly that alerted him to the idea that perhaps the driver wasn’t the owner of the car, as the owner wouldn’t do that. Nor would someone who had borrowed the car from someone they knew. In fact the car was stolen. This crime wouldn’t have been detected if the traffic cop hadn’t noticed something seemed a bit weird. Flicking ash inside the car didn’t fit the pattern of what he’d expect to see from the driver of a new car.
The main barriers to our spidey-senses kicking in is being too fixed in our mindset and too limited in our curiosities about inconsistencies. These become the blockers to asking new questions of a situation and spotting something that might warrant further attention.
Spotting oddities and quirks can inspire fresh perspectives. When something doesn’t fit, rather than dismissing it as not belonging, be curious in case it reveals a meaningful discrepancy. Yes, anomalies can turn out to be nothing, but sometimes they are precious signals that can lead to an important re-think.
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